Notorious anti-vaccine activist Jenny McCarthy just got cut from The View, so it’s too bad this din’t come up sooner. CNN even calls McCarthy out by name in reporting on a new review from the medical journal Pediatrics of more than 20,000 studies on vaccines for children. The review shows that vaccines have no connection to autism, are very safe, and have very few side effects, and almost all of those temporary:

Children should get vaccinated against preventable and potentially deadly diseases. Period.

That’s what a review of more than 20,000 scientific studies on childhood vaccines concludes this week. The review appears in the latest edition of the medical journal Pediatrics.

The evidence strongly suggests that side effects from vaccines are incredibly rare, the study authors said. They found no ties between vaccines and the rising number of children with autism, as a small but vocal group of anti-vaccine activists, including actors Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carey [sic], have said.

Elizabath Cohen explains why those who opt out put more people at risk:

An increasing number of parents over the years have opted out of getting their children vaccinated. And that may be having a negative impact on the community’s health.

A study found that large clusters of children who had not been vaccinated were close to the large clusters of whooping cough cases in the 2010 California epidemic. While California typically has higher vaccination rates than the rest of the country, that state is dealing with yet another whooping cough epidemic.

This spring also saw an 18-year high number of measles cases in the United States. The largest outbreak was in Ohio where the virus spread quickly among the Amish, who are mostly unvaccinated. This outbreak was a real surprise to health officials who thought that the infectious disease was thought to have been eliminated from the United States in 2000.

The state of Washington also had a major outbreak of measles this spring. The state does not require vaccinations for children entering schools, although unvaccinated children can be barred from classes during outbreaks. KIRO-TV reported on this last week, and interviewed a father who has refused to vaccinate his children:

Kids don’t like shots, it’s true; I was frightened of needles as child, too. Measles, mumps, and the whooping cough are a heck of a lot worse than a needle.